CRIME
Philippines jails five for life
Five Taiwanese men were sentenced to life imprisonment and fined 4 million pesos (US$79,106) each in the Philippines after a local court found them guilty of illegal possession and manufacture of drugs in a case from five years ago. In a 27-page decision delivered on Wednesday by a branch of the Paranaque Regional Trial Court, the men received life sentences for violating the Philippines’ Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002. The five were identified as Cheng Yu-teng (鄭裕騰), Tsai Horng-jen (蔡宏仁), Yu Kun-lin (游坤霖), Huang Yung-chun (黃永浚) and Hsu Yun-pong (徐雲鵬). Eight other accomplices are wanted by Philippine authorities. The men were arrested on Aug. 19, 2012, at an underground amphetamine factory in Paranaque, south of Manila, during a joint operation by Philippine police and Taiwan’s Investigation Bureau.
FISHERIES
Indonesian claim denied
The Fisheries Agency on Thursday said that Taiwanese boats had not been fishing illegally in Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone as Jakarta has claimed. Deep Sea Fisheries Division Director Lin Ding-rong (林頂榮) said the agency could provide evidence from its monitoring system, which tracks the operations of about 1,800 Taiwanese fishing boats. The Indonesian government should produce evidence to support its accusation of illegal fishing by seven Taiwanese boats in Indonesian waters, he said. Lin was responding to a statement by Indonesian Minister of Marine and Fisheries Susi Pudjiastuti, who on Wednesday said that 12 foreign boats, including seven from Taiwan, had been seen fishing close to Indonesia’s Biak Island. Among the 12 boats seen poaching, four were from Japan and one was from China, Pudjiastuti said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching